Soups: The salads of winter

Image: Milkos/Bigstock.com

Are you worried about gaining weight this winter? What, with all the hearty winter dishes we tend to consume, the less time spent outdoors and more time snuggled up on the couch, it’s easy to see where the risk of those extra winter kilos comes from.

But how can you avoid it?

The answer, our dear readers, is in the soup! Soups are an easy way to maximise your veggie intake and consume a low-calorie meal. Most of us tend to gravitate away from those light summer salads into hearty meals like roast dinners, pastas and pies in winter, but that doesn’t mean your veggies have to disappear altogether.

Soups are the salads of winter time. To keep your caloric intake (and waistline) under control this year, you just need to get soup savvy.

Soups for weight loss

It’s no secret that consuming low energy foods is helpful when it comes to weight loss. However, these foods often appear in our minds as vegetables and salads—aka rabbit food—where you will feel starving constantly and struggle through deprivation to reduce your weight. Well, healthy low energy food does not have to mean starvation.

Soups provide a warm, satisfying meal which can fill you up, but still come within your calorie budget. How? You might ask. I always feel hungry after soup. You might need to look at your ingredients.

Energy density in food is key to long-term weight management. A study published in the journal Obesity in 2005 compared participants consuming two low energy-dense meals (and yes, soups were actually used in the research) to participants consuming equal calories of energy-dense foods (two high-calorie snacks).

They found that the group consuming low energy foods (soups) led to a 50% greater weight loss than the group consuming the same calories per day in energy-dense foods. This goes to show that the quality of calories is just as important as the amount you consume and that soups are a great way to include quality calories!

So, if you’re watching your weight this winter, whipping up a batch of soup might be your answer.

The basic recipe

For those with a soup phobia, or those who doubt their kitchen skills, rest easy. There’s very little that can go wrong with making soup. The basic ingredients include:

The base – usually a stock of some kind, we like the Massel brand because it contains less salt than others. You may choose to create your own broth by simmering vegetables and/or meat/chicken in a pot of water and then sieving it into a liquid.

Protein – this could be chicken, beef, lamb or lentils/legumes. Using legumes when making soups helps to create a thick hearty texture and, being extremely low GI, they help to fill you up and leave you satisfied.

Wholegrains – this component can be optional. If you choose to have bread with your soup, its best to omit grains as you might be doubling up on carbohydrate serves. Wholegrains that go nicely in soups include barley, brown rice or quinoa.

Normally the stock adds plenty of flavour but if you want to spice things up try adding garlic, ginger, rosemary, thyme, sage or other herbs and spices. So much variety!

Missing ingredients. If you are still hungry after consuming soups, you have likely skipped a component e.g. lacking legumes (protein/fibre) or no grains.

Too many ingredients. If you have doubled up with ingredients you may have over-done it. For example, if you have made a soup with barley and then serving it with a wholegrain bread roll, you have one too many serves of carbs.

So fill up, not out, this winter by getting your soup on! The soup Nazis might say, ‘No soup for you!’ but we say soup for everybody!

Sue Radd is an Advanced Accredited Practising Dietitian and one of Australia’s leading nutritionists and health communicators. Her most recent book Food as Medicine: Eating for Your Best Health received the Gourmand World Cookbook Award for Best Health and Nutrition Book in the world for 2016.

To receive a free copy of Three Things that Really Matter (in retirement) sign up here forthe weekly RETIRENOTES.com email.

A fascinating experiment found that retirees who were encouraged to envisage their retirement wanted to save 31% more of their pay for retirement than those who hadn’t imagined theirs. Visualising can have an impact because it imagines a future possibility. By imagining it, we’re more prepared to make it happen.

In theory, the Age Pension age is set as the minimum age at which a typical senior is considered no longer able to work enough hours to generate the income needed for a modest standard of living. However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t work.

After taking the previous steps to this point, it’s now time to enjoy the harvest and to celebrate. What you’ve planted and nurtured on the inside, should now begin to produce a harvest on the outside.

The YourLifeChoices Retirement Affordability Index aims to help you understand how much money you currently need to live at various levels and lifestyles in retirement. In this issue, there’s a helpful discussion about how to make your Superannuation go further.

You are no doubt aware they exist. You may have seen them on foodie blogs, Instagram feeds or on the menu at your local café. Wholegrains are an important food group essential to a healthy diet. Read on to find out why they are so wonderful and how you can eat more!